XXXVIII

XXXVIII

TO UNDERSTAND MY UNCLE’S invocation of these illustrious French scholars, one must know that an event of great importance for paleontology had occurred some time before our departure.

On March 28,1863, some excavators working under the direction of Mr. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of Moulin Quignon, near Abbeville, in the department of the Somme in France, found a human jawbone fourteen feet beneath the surface. It was the first fossil of its kind that had ever been unearthed. Nearby stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads were found, stained and coated with a uniform patina by the ages.8

The repercussions of this discovery were great, not in France alone, but in England and in Germany. Several scholars of the French Institute, among others Messrs. Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, took the affair very seriously, proved the irrefutable authenticity of the bone in question, and became the most ardent advocates in this ‘trial of the jawbone,’ as it was called in English.

Geologists of the United Kingdom who considered the fact as certain—Messrs. Falconer, Busk, Carpenter,9 and others—were soon joined by scholars from Germany, and among them, in the first rank, the most energetic, the most enthusiastic, was my uncle Lidenbrock.

The authenticity of a human fossil from the Quaternary epochbt therefore seemed to be irrefutably proven and admitted.

This theory, to be sure, encountered a most obstinate opponent in Mr. Élie de Beaumont.bu This scholar, a great authority, maintained that the soil of Moulin Quignon did not belong to the “diluvium” ‡ but to a more recent layer and, agreeing with Cuvier, he refused to admit that the human species had been contemporary with the animals of the Quaternary epoch. My uncle Lidenbrock, in agreement with the great majority of geologists, had stood his ground, disputed, and argued, until Mr. Élie de Beaumont had remained almost alone on his side.

We knew all the details of this affair, but we were not aware that since our departure the question had made further progress. Other identical jawbones, though they belonged to individuals of various types and different nations, were found in the loose grey soil of certain caves in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, along with weapons, utensils, tools, bones of children, adolescents, adults and old people. The existence of Quaternary man was therefore receiving more confirmation every day.

And that was not all. New remains exhumed from Tertiary Pliocene soil had allowed even bolder geologists to attribute an even greater age to the human race. These remains, to be sure, were not human bones, but products of his industry that carried the mark of human work, such as shin and thigh bones of fossil animals with regular grooves, sculpted as it were.

Thus, with one leap, man moved back on the time scale by many centuries. He preceded the mastodon; he was a contemporary of elephas meridionalis;bv he lived a hundred thousand years ago, since that is the date that the most famous geologists give for the formation of Pliocene soil.

Such, then, was the state of paleontological science, and what we knew of it was enough to explain our attitude toward this boneyard on the Lidenbrock Sea. It is therefore easy to understand my uncle’s amazement and joy when, twenty yards further on, he found himself in the presence of, one might say face to face with, a specimen of Quaternary man.

It was a perfectly recognizable human body. Had some special kind of soil, like that of the St. Michel cemetery in Bordeaux, preserved it like this over the centuries? I do not know. But this corpse, with its tight, parchment-like skin, its limbs still soft—at least on sight—intact teeth, abundant hair, frighteningly long finger and toe nails, presented itself to our eyes just as it was when it had been alive.

I was speechless when faced with this apparition of another age. My uncle, usually a talkative and impetuous speaker, also kept silent. We had lifted the body. We had raised it up. It looked at us with its empty eye-sockets. We touched its resonant torso.

After a few moments of silence, the uncle was overcome by Professor Otto Lidenbrock again who, carried away by his temperament, forgot the circumstances of our journey, the place where we were, the enormous cave that surrounded us. No doubt he thought he was at the Johanneum, lecturing to his students, for he assumed a learned voice and addressed an imaginary audience:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I have the honor of introducing a man of the Quaternary period to you. Eminent scholars have denied his existence, others no less eminent have affirmed it. The St. Thomases of paleontology, if they were here, would touch him with their fingers, and would be forced to acknowledge their error. I am quite aware that science has to be on its guard with discoveries of this kind. I know how Barnum and other charlatans of the same ilk have exploited fossil men.bw I know the story of Ajax’ kneecap, the alleged body of Orestes found by the Spartans, and of the ten-cubit tall body of Asterius mentioned by Pausanias. I’ve read the reports on the skeleton of Trapani, discovered in the fourteenth century, which was at the time identified as that of Polyphemus, and the history of the giant unearthed in the sixteenth century near Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen, the analysis of large bones carried out at Lucerne in 1577, which the famous Dr. Felix Plater declared to be those of a nineteen-foot tall giant. I have devoured the treatises of Cassanion, and all those dissertations, pamphlets, speeches, and rejoinders published respecting the skeleton of Teutobochus, king of the Cimbrians and invader of Gaul, dug out of a sandpit in the Dauphiné in 1613! In the eighteenth century I would have fought with Pierre Campet against the pre-adamites of Scheuchzer.10 In my hands I have a text called Gigan—”

Here my uncle’s natural weakness re-emerged, that of being unable to pronounce difficult words in public.

“The text called Gigan—”

He could go no further.

“Giganteo—”

Impossible! The unfortunate word would not come out!

They would have had a good laugh at the Johanneum! “Gigantosteology” the professor finally managed to say, between two swearwords.

Then he continued with renewed energy and spirits:

“Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things! I also know that Cuvier and Blumenbach have identified these bones as simple bones of mammoths and other animals of the Quaternary period. But in this case doubt would be an insult to science! The corpse is here! You can see it, touch it. It’s not a skeleton, it’s an intact body, preserved for a purely anthropological purpose!”

I took care not to contradict this assertion.

“If I could wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid,” pursued my uncle, “I would be able to remove all the bits of soil and the splendid shells that are embedded in it. But I do not have this precious solvent at hand. Yet, such as it is, the body will tell us its own story.”

Here the professor took the fossil corpse and handled it with the skill of a showman.

“You see,” he resumed, “that it’s not even six feet tall, and we are far removed from the alleged giants. As for the race to which it belongs, it is obviously Caucasian. It’s the white race, our own! The skull of this fossil is a regular oval, with no prominent cheekbones, no projecting jaws. It shows no sign of the prognathism that diminishes the facial angle.bx Measure that angle, it’s nearly ninety degrees. But I’ll go even further in my deductions, and I dare say that this human specimen belongs to the Japhetic family, which extends from India to the boundaries of western Europe. Don’t smile, gentlemen.”

Nobody was smiling, but the professor was used to seeing faces spread in smiles during his learned lectures.

“Yes,” he pursued with new energy, “this is a fossil man, a contemporary of the mastodons whose bones fill this amphitheatre. But if you ask me how he came here, how the layers in which he was buried slid into this enormous cavern in the earth, I will not allow myself to answer. No doubt in the Quaternary period considerable upheavals still took place in the earth’s crust. The gradual cooling of the globe created cracks, fissures and faults, into which some of the upper soil probably fell. I want to make no assertions, but after all the man is here, surrounded by the work of his hands, by the hatchets and the flint arrow-heads that made the Stone Age possible, and unless he came here as a tourist and a pioneer of science like myself, I cannot doubt the authenticity of his ancient origin.”

The professor fell silent, and I broke into unanimous applause. In any case my uncle was right, and more learned men than his nephew would have had trouble arguing with him.

Another clue. This fossilized body was not the only one in the immense boneyard. We found other corpses at every step we took in this dust, and my uncle could choose the most wonderful of these specimens to convince the skeptics.

Indeed it was an amazing spectacle, these generations of men and animals commingled in this cemetery. But one serious question arose that we dared not answer. Had these beings slid down to the shore of the Lidenbrock Sea through an upheaval in the ground when they were already reduced to dust? Or did they rather dwell in this underground world, under this artificial sky, living and dying like the inhabitants of the earth? Until now, only sea monsters and fishes had appeared to us alive! Did some man of the abyss still wander on this desert strand?